The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was down at the Diner a couple months ago. Anita, our morning waitress had let slip the news they were going to change the menus. Some of the regulars were instantly agitated — and this was before their second cup of Black Tar coffee, a high-dosage distilled caffeine that would prop a trucker ramrod straight behind the wheel of a Kenworth hauling from Stanwood to Berdoo.

“Why tamper with perfection?” 3 Putt Pete was asking the entire assemblage of us Late Morning crowd, although purportedly he was aiming his alarm at Brenda behind the cash register. When she’d finished ringing up Little Willy, our ex-commissioner who served one term before half these yahoos sent him packing over a detour during a months long road construction, she turned on 3 Putt and scowled her Early Morning No Nonsense scowl that sent half the boyz back to breakfast lest she shot a laser blast at them, ruining way more than some suddenly overcooked omelette smoldering on a charred plate. 3 Putt wasn’t looking her way, unfortunately for him, sort of like Bambi hopping happily in the meadow before Godzilla makes venison toejam out of our cute critic.

“Why, oh why,” he was lamenting, maybe imagining this was his Big Chance at a thespian breakthrough, play to the Imagined Producer who might be taking breakfast Off Broadway, “why can’t we just accept things as they are, not ruin em by pushing the limits to what might never be?”

By the conclusion of his soliloquy, Pete was practically standing on his chair, fork and knife dancing in a grand flourish of stainless and saliva, the expected applause, the cries of ‘Author’ and ‘Bravo!’ soon to follow …. when Brenda slammed the register shut to steal the finale while shaking a receipt in 3 Putt’s direction. You could’ve heard an egg break back on Big Larry’s grill as total silence descended on the café heavy as that chlorine gas leak the previous week when a welding torch opened a mystery tank and set off a South End mustard gas evacuation.

“For the luvva Grease, Pete, will you sit down!? We’re not changing the food, you fool, just the damn menus. These old ones are tattered and stained. You’ll still get your chicken fried steak and that heart attack that can’t come quick enough, you ask me.”

3 Putt, you can rest assured, left enough tip to pay half the printing costs. And when those new menus arrived a few days later, it was Pete who admitted they were a fine addition to the Diner and asked meekly if he could take one of the old ones home. As a special keepsake. Historians, it seems, are made, not born.

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